Minneapolis: As vote counting continues, Hodges on track to become mayor

Minneapolis officials said Wednesday that they would be counting votes in that city's mayoral race until midnight.

"If they don't have a winner by midnight, we'll resume in the morning," said Matt Laible, a city spokesman.

There were 35 candidates on the mayoral ballot, and the front-runner, Minneapolis City Council member Betsy Hodges, had retained a sizable lead over former Hennepin County Commissioner Mark Andrew as of Wednesday evening. The winner will be the one to garner 50 percent plus one vote of those cast Tuesday.

Hodges had nearly 37 percent of the first-choice votes. As the lower-ranked votes were slowly tallied: "There hasn't actually been a lot of shifting in the results so far," Laible said.

Andrew conceded to Hodges in a Facebook message to his followers Wednesday night, saying he had called Hodges to congratulate her.

"We ran an incredible campaign but in the end, we just couldn't shake her," Andrew wrote in the message. "Betsy was tenacious, determined and she peaked at the right time. These assets will serve her well as she transitions into her new role as leader of our City."

After 11 rounds of tabulation, nine registered candidates had been dropped.

The tedious counting in Minneapolis was a stark contrast to St. Paul, where Mayor Chris Coleman won re-election to a third term in office with 78 percent of first-choice votes. Voter turnout was the city's lowest for a mayoral contest in at least 30 years.

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"I think it was slow everywhere," said Ramsey County Elections Manager Joe Mansky.

An estimated 14 percent of eligible St. Paul voters went to the polls Tuesday to cast votes for mayor, school board and a new city council member in Ward 1, which spans Frogtown and Summit-University.

"This has been the lowest turnout at least going back to 1985, which is as far as my records go back," Mansky said. That race marked the last time that George Latimer -- who served 14 consecutive years in office -- ran for re-election. Latimer won with 84 percent of the vote, trumping even Coleman's decisive win Tuesday.

"Mayor Coleman received more than three-fourths of the votes cast on Tuesday. Voters looked back at the past eight years and decided we are headed in decidedly the right direction," said mayoral spokesman Joe Campbell.

While turnout was down throughout the city, it was somewhat elevated in St. Paul's Ward 1 compared to past years. Seven candidates appeared on the ranked-choice ballot, leaving two front-runners, Dai Thao and Noel Nix, with 27 percent and 25 percent of the vote, respectively. The winner, though, will not be known until next week. A hand count of ballots begins at 8:30 a.m. Monday at the county government building on Plato Boulevard. Mansky expects final results by noon.

Ward 1 numbers have been sliding the past decade. There were 4,889 voters in the 2003 city council election; 4,579 in 2007; and 3,593 in 2011. On Tuesday, there were 4,766 votes.

For the ward, "what we had yesterday was not atypical," Mansky said.

Some observers looking at second-choice and third-choice election returns on the Ramsey County website believe Dai Thao has bested Nix. Mansky cautioned against trying to predict a winner.

"It's more complicated than I think people imagine," Mansky said.

"If Noel and Dai stay ahead of everyone else, we will never look at the second-choice votes on their ballots," Mansky said, noting it will be the ranked choices of the candidates with fewer votes that will be counted first and that it's possible many of Dai's voters' second-choices were for Noel, and vice versa. "I think there's limited information you can garner simply by looking at how many second-choice votes somebody got."

MINNEAPOLIS

Counts in the additional Minneapolis races, including city council, will begin once the mayor's race is complete, Laible said. All 13 Minneapolis council seats were on the ballot, and seven new council members will be sworn in in January.

Among the newcomers is Abdi Warsame, who took 64 percent of the vote, well ahead of incumbent Robert Lilligren, making the 35-year-old tenants association leader the highest-ranking Somali-American elected official in the country.

Warsame left Somalia as a child and spent much of his life in England. He moved to Minneapolis in 2006 and heads the tenant association in the Riverside Plaza high-rise that is home to some 4,000 East Africans.

The Minneapolis-St. Paul area is home to the highest concentration of Somali immigrants in the United States.

In Minneapolis, "voter turnout was about 80,000 -- it translated to about 30 percent of registered voters," said Jeanne Massey, director of FairVote Minnesota, a ranked-choice advocacy group.

"Turnout was decent. Ranked-choice voting doesn't drive voting, one way or another. When there's a lot of fight, people come out. When there's a lot at stake, people come out. It's about what we predicted."

LET'S DO LUNCH

Even though the outcome of the Minneapolis mayoral election was not official, Coleman announced that he would have a private lunch with Hodges on Thursday in Minneapolis.